Arne puffed out a cloud of vile smoke, which was quickly stripped away by the wind. “There’s two ways to hit a small target that’s a long way off. Skill or luck. Now I’m not a bad shot—I’m not saying that. Better’n average for sure. Especially now with all the practice I get. It’s ‘Let the Dead-Eye take the shot.’ ‘Give Arne the bow.’ But that day at Jarl Torsteff’s wedding celebrations . . .” Arne shrugged. “Had men from all over come to take part in the contests. Axe-throwing. Rock-lifting. Wrestling. All that. Archery, well, it’s never been our strong point, but there were plenty willing. The jarl set up this coin, far too far out, and nobody could hit the damn thing. It was getting dark before they let me have a go. Took it down first try. Never heard the last of it. And that’s how it is in this world, boy. Start a tale, just a little tale that should fade and die—take your eye off it for just a moment and when you turn back it’s grown big enough to grab you up in its teeth and shake you. That’s how it is. All our lives are tales. Some spread, and grow in the telling. Others are just told between us and the gods, muttered back and forth behind our days, but those tales grow too and shake us just as fierce.”

I groaned and lay back across the bench, trying to find some angle that brought it past the halfway mark on the line dividing “torture device” and “bed.” I would have just lain down between the benches, but each lunge of the boat brought foul-smelling bilgewater sloshing along the aisle in miniature imitation of the vast waves on which we tossed.

“Wake me when the storm’s passed.”

“Storm?” A shadow fell across me.

“You’re going to tell me that it’s always like this, aren’t you?” I squinted up at the figure, dark against the bright sky, sunlight fracturing around him to sting my eyes. A tall man, annoyingly athletic. One of the quins.

“Oh no.” He sat on the bench opposite, his good cheer like acid on my hangover. “It’s rarely as good as this.”

“Urrrg.” Actual words seemed insufficient to express my feelings on the matter. I wondered if Skilfar had seen that I was destined to fill a longship with vomit and drown in the resulting mess.

“Snorri says you’re good with wounds.” He started tugging up his sleeve without invitation. “I’m Fjórir, by the way—we can be hard to tell apart.”

“Jesus!” I winced as Fjórir unwrapped the soiled linen from around his forearm. The jagged tear went right down into the meat of him, with every shade from black to puce on show in the puffy flesh to either side. The stink of it told the story. When a man’s wound starts to smell wrong, you know he’s on a slow walk to the cemetery. Perhaps losing the arm might save him—I didn’t really know. Beyond adjusting the odds when betting on pit fights, my experience didn’t really concern such things. True, there had been similar unpleasantness on the Scorron borders, but I’d successfully discarded those memories. Or at least I had until a whiff of a Norseman’s putrid arm brought them all back in a flood. At least this time I made it to the side before retching into the dark swell of the waves. I spent a long time hanging there, holding a loud but wordless conversation with the sea.